The SegaCD version of Golden Axe as included to the Sega Arcade Collection is the best home conversion of Golden Axe to date. It features the original Mega Drive / Genesis port with a great remastered CDDA version of the original Arcade soundtrack. It has only one major flaw: For some odd reason they decided to deactivate the 2 player mode:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Axe#Other_ports_and_versions

That is a fact. Although the game seems to be identical to the cartridge version, it can't be played with 2 Players.

On the cart, the 2nd player presses START on Controller #2 to active the 2 player mode. On SCD it just doesn't work. If you press START on Controller #2, nothing happens. If you press START on Controller #1, it starts with the regular 1 player mode.


SEGA CD conversion in KEGA Fusion:


original Cartridge version:



I tried it with all versions of the SEGA Arcade Collection that I could get my hands on, both via emulation and on real hardware (my X'Eye): My original EU PAL copy (via Tototek MegaCart), two different US copies, and I even ordered the Japanese version (which on an interesting side note is based on the US version it seems, as it includes "Streets of Rage" which is listed as "Bare Knuckle US" in the manual).

Here are the versions currently indexed in TOSEC:
Sega Classics Arcade Collection (1992)(Sega)(NTSC)(US)[!][compilation - 4 games][SEGA-4126RE2 R1C]
Sega Classics Arcade Collection (1992)(Sega)(NTSC)(US)[!][compilation - 4 games][SEGA4126RE R1D]
Sega Classics Arcade Collection (1992)(Sega)(NTSC)(US)[!][compilation - 5 games][CDAC-056800 2]
Sega Classics Arcade Collection - Limited Edition (1992)(Sega)(PAL)[!][compilation][6105411P-00036A-R1M]
Sega Classics Arcade Collection - Limited Edition (1993)(Sega)(PAL)[!][compilation][610-5411P-00036A 2]

- All suffering from the same problem.


Now, my request is if someone with knowledge of 68k assembler (and a little love for the MD/G port of Golden Axe) could look into it and compare the cart with the CD conversion to see if it's an intentional modification (or -unlikely- a bug), and if the 2 player routines are still there somewhere in the code, so that they could be re-enabled, at least in theory.

I think it's on purpose. That quoted part says it's got a higher frame rate, different background music, and voice overs. In other words, they most likely recoded the port from the ground up.

I don't think 2P mode is even in there anymore.

 I dunno. The main processor is limited in memory(2megabit), but in 1M/1M mode you have fairly quick access to the sub-cpu's separate 4megabit memory. If you ran code out of system ram (probably wouldn't be more than 30-40k) and keep all the tile/sprites uncompressed in 2megabit address range, that should be enough for all sprite animations for a single level. Most tiles would be resident in vram and the small amount that aren't should still fit into the 2megabit range. Plus you still have access to the swappable 1M of the sub-cpu. It is suspicious that the 2nd player is missing considering. If it was a bug, they probably would have fixed it in newer versions. It was probably more of a unfinished feature. One way to find out